Reality as Shadows

Nature and Man are the shadows of perpetuity.

Shadowed experience drapes itself across us,

 a cloak made from laughter and lament,

yet we parade as if we own its fabric,

forgetting that war is the seamstress of nightmares,

and birth the sculptor of unfinished statues.

We walk on,

blind to the fractures that spiderweb across every mirror we dare to trust.

Perfection arrives only as a mirage,

a fleeting oasis in the desert of time.

When eyelids surrender to sleep,

we sip from the chalice of reprieve,

only to awaken into the furnace where silence burns louder than flame.

Man fears the blaze,

yet feeds it with careless hands,

a moth mistaking fire for moonlight.

Who among us has unraveled the braided hemp of Understanding?

It swings between tides and tempests,

between dawn’s blade and dusk’s velvet,

between the hush of infinity and the thunder of silence disguised as peace.

Experience is shadow,

a phantom tethered to our heels,

loyal as a dog yet sly as a trickster,

mocking our worship of light.

It dances when we stumble,

it kneels when we rise,

it waits when we forget.

And in the end,

Shadow is not absence,

it is Nature’s architect of presence.

It is the ink that writes our days,

the gravity that bends our choices,

the unseen monarch whose crown is carved from every eclipse.

We do not cast Shadows, Shadows cast us,

etching our lives as silhouettes on the wall of infinity.